One of the more confusing aspects of the great financial crisis of 2008 is that, while several national economies remain on the brink of total collapse, the banks and their billion-bonus bankers appear to be in vulgar health. But it turns out there's a simple explanation for this: the banks are much bigger than national economies.

That was the message of Britain's Banks: Too Big to Save? We learned that the loans and investments of Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC each exceeded £1.5 trillion just before the meltdown. "That's greater," as Robert Peston, the Beeb's verbally eccentric finance guru noted, "than Britain's GDPeeeeeee!"

Not since Loyd Grossman's heyday has any TV presenter produced such excitingly unpredictable locutions and stresses as Peston. If every voice is an instrument, then his is a Moog synthesizer playing the works of Rachmaninov. Sometimes he's so violently emphatic it's hard to keep in mind what he's emphasising.

Oh, that's right, the complex madness of our financial system, which has created things like CDOs². What are CDOs²? None of the experts Peston interviewed seemed sure, which was worrying because half of them ran banks and the other half regulated them. One did manage to say that the term stood for "collateralised debt obligations squared", although I was none the wiser, especially as apparently there are also "synthetic" CDOs² and even CDOs³.

It would have been nice if regulators had been a bit more OCD about CDOs, but Peston recounted how the people charged with overseeing global finance met in Basle in Switzerland before the crisis and decided that nothing much needed changing in the system. That's scary to think about, but not nearly as scary as the fact that they've met since the crisis and the same system remains in place.

There was a debate about banking in 10 O'Clock Live, C4's new satire show which, as the title suggests, goes out live. David Mitchell, of this parish, noted that anger at the banks has gone "way beyond the irritation at the pens on strings". It was the best line in what turned out to be a non-event discussion, and one of the highlights of what felt very much like a trial-run hour.

Both Mitchell and Jimmy Carr, who coined the imperishable double-entendre "Johnson out, Balls in" to mark the shadow cabinet reshuffle, enjoyed successful first nights. That's chiefly because they had the strongest monologues and, as it stands, 10 O'Clock Live is over-leveraged on contractualised diatribe obligations.

Charlie Brooker's rant on the egregious Sarah Palin was a frenzied rush at a door that had been kicked off its hinges a long time ago, and all he managed to hit was a brick wall. Whereas the fourth member, Lauren Laverne, had to make do with a lame skit on another mouldy target, American news anchors, and came across as a rather fey Tina Fey. Even the more up-to-date material, such as the revolt in Tunisia, suffered from over-exposure, not least in the show itself, where it featured in two almost identical riffs on tourism.

Although you only launch once, these are very early days. The comedic chemistry and sense of live urgency will take a while to develop. It was not helped by the blank spaciousness of the set, which leaves the participants looking removed not just from the audience but external events. The show's key asset, though, is four talented performers. Last Thursday they each looked as if they desperately didn't want to be the one that failed. Either they make more overt use of that competition or increase the opportunities for collaboration. More dialogue, in other words, and less monologue.

There's been talk that 10 O'Clock Live might compete with Question Time, against which its scheduled, for a mainstream political audience. It's a reasonable theory but it underestimates both the enduring strength of QT's format and its ability to turn its hand to satire. How else to explain George Galloway's righteous dramatics about the suicide of David Kelly, in which he accused fellow panellist Alastair Campbell of driving the weapons inspector to his death?

It couldn't be moral indignation, because it was only a few months ago that Galloway appeared on the Iranian state's English-language propaganda channel, Press TV, for which he works, conducting an interview of stupefying proctological moistness with "Your Excellency, President Ahmadinejad", while countless Iranians lay tortured and under threat of death and stoning in overflowing jails.

Therefore we have little choice but to view Galloway's outrage as another demonstration of the rich comedic gift that gave us the unforgettable (and I've tried) catsuit mime on Celebrity Big Brother. Still, it must have rattled Campbell, because he said that if the Chilcot inquiry found that the Iraq war was illegal, then "the people who took us into this unlawful war deserve to be punished".

He tried to step back from the statement when David Dimbleby pointed out what he'd said, but it's out there for ever. It's lucky that Campbell is no longer a spin doctor because he would now have to give himself the kind of bollocking that would make The Thick of It's Malcolm Tucker blush.

Piers Morgan questioned Condoleezza Rice about Iraq in Piers Morgan Tonight, his new talkshow on CNN, taking over from Larry King. She wasn't flustered, and Morgan didn't seem that interested. He was more concerned with her love life, or absence of it. There were some cheesy attempts at flirting (by him, not her) but it seemed like a long hour, even taking into account the incessant ads for golf in Dubai.

Then again, Rice wasn't the big guest of the week. That, of course, was Ricky Gervais. The Iraq war is so 2003, whereas the big global story of the moment is a risqué set at the Golden Globes. Gervais spent a long time insisting that he wasn't bothered about the critical response. No, not a bit. Not bothered at all. Although after half an hour of his maintaining that he was completely unbothered, you began to wonder if perhaps he wasn't really very bothered indeed.

Morgan played the interview as two Brits made good in the States, and the air of self-satisfaction – which Morgan wears like aftershave – sometimes threatened to reach levels of suffocating smugness. It was only the golf in the Gulf that came to the rescue. Having only ever watched Larry King when I was jet-lagged in foreign hotel rooms, I can't say how Morgan compares. But an hour is a gaping hole to fill with just one guest. He needs some other distractions.